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‘The Alabama Solution’ Documentary Trailer Just Dropped from ‘The Jinx’ Director Andrew Jarecki And Charlotte Kaufman, Featuring Cinematography by Nick Kraus
September 25, 2025
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written by Matthew Carey, Deadline 

Alabama officials insist nothing problematic is going on with the state’s prison system, but evidence secretly collected by inmates themselves shows otherwise.

Their shocking footage, recorded on smuggled cell phones, bursts into view in The Alabama Solution, the new documentary from The Jinx and The Jinx: Part Two director Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman (producer of The Jinx: Part Two). It shows guards allegedly subjecting inmates to terrible beatings and abuse, brutal treatment that allegedly cost at least one prisoner – Steven Davis — his life.

The film premieres on HBO Max on Friday, October 10. We have your first look at the documentary in the trailer above.
“In 2019, filmmakers visit an Alabama prison to film a revival meeting,” notes a synopsis. “Off camera, incarcerated men whisper a message: terrible things are going on here and being kept secret. This sparks an immersive six-year investigation to discover the reality behind the walls of one of the nation’s deadliest prison systems.”
The synopsis continues, “Through unprecedented direct access and video shot on contraband cell phones, the filmmakers learn from the men inside about a suspicious and violent death. The story unfolds in real time, revealing it isn’t an isolated incident and that the official version appears far from the truth. What follows is a shocking story of brutality, corruption, and a system in collapse. As the men fight for their own survival, they embark on a campaign of resistance, against all odds.”

The Alabama Solution premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

“The prisons have been allowed to run essentially unmonitored,” Jarecki told us at Sundance. “There is no control over the behavior of guards or over the ability to provide any kind of basic level of humane treatment for people who are mentally ill or people who are troubled or just people who are vulnerable because it’s an environment where resources are so scarce.”

Cell phones are banned in prisons, but they routinely find their way in – often, it would seem, via guards who pocket profits from selling them to inmates.

“The phenomena of these cell phones has opened up access and the opportunity not only for us to see in,” Kaufman told Deadline, “but for them to communicate out in a very meaningful and historic way.”

In addition to Sundance, the documentary screened at DC/DOX in the nation’s capital and at Sheffield DocFest in the U.K.

On the Sundance website, Bailey Pennick, associate editorial director of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, wrote of The Alabama Solution, “It’s hard to catch your breath at the end of the film because there’s no way to go back to being blind to the injustice and the corruption that exists within our own institutions. There’s a feeling of helplessness in the shadow of the larger prison industrial complex, and dismay at what to do next.”

Along with alleged abuse by guards, the documentary exposes alarming living conditions for prisoners who are stacked in barracks like cord wood. And it raises the question of whether inmates are being used as slave labor – the focus of a class action lawsuit that’s now being litigated.

“People probably assume, ‘Well, a lot of the prisons in the country, they may not be like Hilton hotels… but there’s got to be some basic level of humane treatment,’” Jarecki told us at Sundance. “[But] when you delve further and you discover that a system like Alabama is far from any minimal level of humane treatment, it’s pretty shocking. Nothing works. The system is really in free fall.”

HBO Documentary Films presents The Alabama Solution. Directed and produced by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman; co-produced by Alelur “Alex” Duran, Page Marsella, and Beth Shelburne. For HBO, executive producers are Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, and Sara Rodriguez.

Jarecki won a Primetime Emmy for 2015’s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst and earned an Oscar nomination for his 2004 documentary Capturing the Friedmans.

Watch the trailer for The Alabama Solution above.

Featuring Work from Director of Photography Nick Kraus

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